Growth of vertically aligned Cu nanowires for improved heat transfer

Abstract

Phase-change heat transfer is a fundamental of the thermal transport at various length scales, including industrial power plants and microchip electronics. Therefore, one of the strategies of enhancement of heat transfer is the enhancement of critical heat flux and thermal conductance of the heating surface. This study presents a facile synthesis method of vertically aligned Cu nanorods array on a copper substrate for enhanced heat transfer. These Cu nanorods were further used as building blocks to form a hierarchical Cu/ZnO nanorods arrays. Morphological and water contact angle characteristics have revealed that growth of nanostructures have greatly improves surface wettability, where hierarchical CuO/ZnO substrate shows complete hydrophilic behavior. Furthermore, boiling heat transfer characteristics confirm that Cu substrate with nanostructured hydrophilic surface have superior heat transfer properties compared to the plain Cu, owing to the improved surface wettability and high-density bubble nucleation sites